Temperature rises 0.1 degree since 2007, casting doubts on UN study

By Alex Mills

Published 5:00 am, Friday, December 6, 2013

The winter blast that came through Texas last week was very cold and very early.

What in blue blazes is going on?

All of the scientists on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published their latest report on global warming just two months ago, and they are just as convinced today as they were six years ago that the Earth is getting hotter.

However, their own data paints a different picture. The fact remains that since the IPCC’s last report in 2007 temperatures have increased 0.1 degree.

Yet, the report proclaimed: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”

Actually, there has been virtually no change in the Earth’s average temperature since 1998. Going back 150 years, temperatures have risen just 0.8 Celsius.

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n 2007, IPCC’s report stated that temperatures were “likely” to increase by more than 2 degrees, and “very unlikely” to increase by less than 1.5 degrees.

Wrong!

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) went so far shortly after IPCC’s 2007 report to report that the “Arctic summers ice-free by 2013.”

However, a mild Arctic summer in 2012 resulted in roughly more than a million square miles of ocean covered in ice than the previous year, or a 60 percent increase.

The BBC quoted a Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University as saying the computer models used to predict Arctic ice melting by the summer of 2013 were very efficient “because it takes account of processes that happen internally in the ice.”

He added — remember this was in 2007 — that “This is not a cycle; not just a fluctuation. In the end, it will all just melt away quite suddenly.”

IPCC continues to forecast slightly rising temperatures. The IPCC predicts that temperatures are “likely” to rise by about 1.5 degrees Celsius throughout the rest of the century. This prediction is very close to IPCC’s “likely” to increase by more than 2 degrees in 2007.

IPCC scientists continue to believe that global warming is caused by greenhouse gases and claim that man-made carbon dioxide is the primary culprit. Carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. have declined in recent years. Maybe, just maybe, there is a connection between the decline in carbon dioxide and temperatures remaining flat for the last six years.

No doubt the world is changing. It always has, and it always will Politicians, however, should not dictate energy and environmental laws and regulations based on studies that have serious flaws.

Alex Mills is president of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers. The opinions expressed are solely of the author.